I am sure that like me you will have met many evangelical Christians who will tell you that the Assumption of Our Lady isn’t true because it isn’t in the Bible. The same sort of people will tell you that St Peter didn’t die in Rome because the Bible doesn’t even tell us that St Peter went to Rome. Well, these are really poor arguments, because just because something is not in the Bible does not make it untrue. And yet, believe it or not, I used to believe them. Some years before I was selected for training with the Church Army I was once involved with the Pentecostalist movement and was regularly involved in meetings with very earnest American evangelists who had come to my home town to convert the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans – yes we like them were in error and needed saving. At the time I believed much of what they were telling me (yet even I baulked at the idea that dinosaur bones were planted by the devil to confuse us.
However, as time went on I began to realise that there was something that didn’t quite ring true with their arguments. There were certain passages of Scripture that stuck out and made me think that there was more going on than they were telling me. You see, not wishing to brag, but I used to read three Scripture readings everyday and amongst them were passages that they never mentioned. And I also began to realise that some of what they taught could not be found in the Bible either – for example they taught that St Paul says that every believer speaks in tongues (or ecstatic utterance as one translation puts it), but that is not the case at all. They also claimed that they believed in the plain word of Scripture as the 16th century reformers did – why then did they believe in the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity which can be deduced from Scripture, but is certainly not a plain word. I could go on about what they taught and didn’t teach all night, but suffice to say I began to find myself challenged not by them, but by Scripture itself – or more properly I should I say by the Holy Spirit as I read Scripture.
But first a little non-Scriptural background information for you about the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is the oldest feast day of Our Lady. The feast’s origin is lost in those days when Jerusalem was restored as a sacred city, at the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 285-337). By then it had been a pagan city for two centuries, ever since Emperor Hadrian (76-138) had levelled it around the year 135. For 200 years, the Romans tried to obliterate every memory of Jesus from the Holy City, and the sites made holy by His life, death and Resurrection became pagan temples.
But of course this preserved them, and after the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 336, the sacred sites began to be restored. The residual memories of the life of Our Lord that had been passed on from generation to generation amongst the indigenous people began to be celebrated by the people of Jerusalem. One of the memories about his mother centred around the "Tomb of Mary," close to Mount Zion, where early Christians had lived. On the hill itself was the "Place of Dormition," the spot of Mary's "falling asleep," where she had died. The "Tomb of Mary" was where she was buried. At this time, the "Memory of Mary" was being celebrated. Later it was to become our feast of the Assumption. For a time, the "Memory of Mary" was observed only in Palestine, but later extended by the emperor to all the churches of the East. It began to be celebrated in Rome as the "Falling Asleep" ("Dormitio") of the Mother of God in the 7th century. Later it became the "Assumption of Mary," since it proclaimed that she was taken up, body and soul, into heaven.
That belief was ancient, dating back to the apostles themselves. What was clear from the beginning was that there were no relics of Mary to be venerated, and that an empty tomb stood on the edge of Jerusalem near the site of her death. That location also soon became a place of pilgrimage. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when bishops from throughout the Mediterranean world gathered in Constantinople, Emperor Marcian asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to bring the relics of Mary to Constantinople to be enshrined in the capitol. The patriarch explained to the emperor that there were no relics of Mary in Jerusalem, that "Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later . . . was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven." Note that the Patriarch quotes a tradition going right back to the apostles – a body could not totally decompose leaving no remains whatsoever within what time was left of the apostles lives, especially in a hot dry climate. “Found empty” means that there were no remains.
In the 8th century, St. John Damascene was known for giving sermons at the holy places in Jerusalem. At the Tomb of Mary, he expressed the belief of the Church on the meaning of the feast: "Although the body was duly buried, it did not remain in the state of death, neither was it dissolved by decay. . . . You were transferred to your heavenly home, O Lady, Queen and Mother of God in truth."
So there is a little bit of information from the early Church Fathers for you concerning the belief of the Church about the Assumption body and soul of Our Lady into heaven. But what about those passages of Scripture that challenged me concerning Our Lady.
Well there were several and tonight’s first reading was one of them. I did not see how this could not be about Our Lady. The people I knew said it referred to the church giving birth in turmoil, but then this comes from within the school of St John the Apostle and he wrote about Christ’s Mother being the mother of the Church. He didn’t use those words and I had never heard them said at that point as I had no Roman or Anglo-Catholic acquaintances. At the crucifixion Our Lord tells Mary “Behold your Son” and says to John, “Behold your Mother.” Now this was dismissed by my friends as some sort of laudable intention by Our Lord to make sure his mother was looked after following his death, but even I recognised (without a formal theological education at that point) that St John’s Gospel dealt with mystery and contained deep theological truths and that it was very different in intent to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But the Apostle John is the only disciple who does not run away – he is the Church and Our Lord says to him “Behold your Mother.” Furthermore in the vision recorded in our first reading, this Lady, who is the Mother of the Church, is in heaven – the text is quite clear.
The Gospel reading set for this Feast also challenged me. St Elizabeth says “For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy” – she had also said a little before that, “And why is this granted me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me.” From this I began to realise that Our Lady was truly, as the Archangel Gabriel said, “full of grace” – in other words free from sin. To be full of grace is to be free from sin – Luke records these words and St John uses them of the Lord Jesus himself in the Prologue of his Gospel – he says that Jesus is “full of grace and truth.” There is something about Our Lady that marks her out; that makes her special – why would Elizabeth say such things about a visit by Our Lady? If my friends were right Elizabeth would have made reference to a visit, even in the womb, by her Saviour not Our Lady. My fundamentalist evangelical friends told me that Mary was not special at all forgetting, of course, that all generations are to call her Blessed. My friends said that she was a sinner just like you and me. But then I remembered another story, this time about Moses and how he asked God if he could see his face. God told him that no man could see his face and live, and the Old Testament is quite clear that the cause of this separation is sin. So what God does is put Moses in the cleft of a rock and as he passes by he puts his hand over Moses face until he has passed him by and so Moses only gets to see God’s back. Now if God is so holy that a sinful person could not see him, how could Mary, if she were a sinner, contain Jesus who is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” within her womb and not be harmed?
Now there were many other episodes that made me think about these things more deeply, but there isn’t time to cover them all. So I want to end with some points about the actual concept of assumption. My fundamentalist friends told me that no one could be assumed as everyone had to wait until judgement day so it was not true that Mary was assumed. But yet again my reading of Scripture showed me quite a different story. I found that in the first Book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis we had the story of Enoch who did not die but was taken up into heaven. I found that in the Book of Kings Elijah did not die, but was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire, and I subsequently read in the Book of Deuteronomy about Moses’ death. The text clearly says that God buried him and that no one had found his grave. There are ancient Jewish beliefs that Moses died and was taken up to heaven bodily. But then, of course, there is the story that really does shatter the idea that no one can reach heaven until the day of judgement and that is of course the story of the Transfiguration of the Lord, when Jesus is transfigured before Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor and we discover that Moses and Elijah are talking with him, and that they too have been glorified.
From all this, and more, I began to see that the Assumption of Our Lady was entirely possible and then when I started Church Army Training and we began to look at Patristics, or early Church history, then I discovered what I wasn’t being told by my friends – some of which I outlined earlier in this homily, but sadly, and to be fair to them, they had never been told either.
But what has all this got to do with you and me and our pilgrimage with Jesus – three things:
a) Our Lady is in heaven and that is our destiny too – where she, Elijah, Moses and Enoch have gone we are called to follow.
b) That Our Lady is our Mother – given to us by Our Lord and like all mothers she guides us her children. How does she guide us we may ask? Well again the answer is in the Scriptures and if you look at the history of all the appearances of her that the Church has decreed to be authentic the same guidance shines through. I am referring to what she told the servants at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee. Referring to Jesus she said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
c) We are to call her “Blessed”, in other words to honour her and to defend her honour for in so doing we defend the doctrine of the Incarnation. It would take another few homilies to explain but as the late Professor Fr John Macquarrie pointed out in his book “Mary for all Christians” all the Dogma’s of the Church concerning Our Lady support and defend the doctrine of the Incarnation.
The Patriarch of Jerusalem reported that "Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later . . . was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven." In the Apostles Creed used at Baptisms and in the BCP Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we say that “we believe in the communion of saints” – we must always remember and defend the truth that Our Lady is included in the Communion of Saints and that amongst the saints she has a unique role as Mother of the Church and from her place in heaven, and as she has shown at so many places where she has appeared to men, women and children; she still says of her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to us her children, “Do whatever he tells you.”
